Category: Life in Switzerland
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Roundup (and BIG news) from Switzerland… #bookblog
Hello everyone – and yes, the blog has come out of hibernation. I needed the blogging break to recharge my batteries after an intensive winter and decide how best to move forwards in today’s challenging book landscape. But summer has come in N.E. Switzerland, and it’s all systems go again. There’ll be 2-4 posts a…
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Backstage! #arts #travel
Last week I went on a backstage tour of the theatre in St Gallen with a group I’m in – it was absolutely fascinating. There’s been a theatre in town since the mid-1800s, but the building of today is modern, ie it opened its doors in 1968, with the most recent renovation a year or…
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New Year, New Book, and a Freebie…
Hello 2026! What should we wish for? Peace and good health are probably top of everyone’s list, so let’s hope hard for those in the coming year. Like most years, 2025 was full of contrasts: things to celebrate, people to grieve. Things we’re glad we did, others we wish we’d never started. Things we did…
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Overhanging balconies – and #books
Balcony pics first. I took all of these in St Gallen, on a street in the old town where you often see groups of tourists wandering around with (and without) tour guides, taking photos of bits of buildings above your head. So you look up, and think, wow, yes, these are seriously amazing; we should…
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A re-release, kindle bargains and a Zeppelin… #books #travel
It’s been a busy week… Starting with the book news – The Attic Room is now re-released by the lovely people at DP Books and is currently available for just 99p on kindle. It’s the start of a trio of my books in a new ‘Family Secrets’ series. (Next up is Ward Zero, which is…
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Summer? #SilentSunday (almost)
June was sweltering. July was… I’m not saying it was wet, or anything, but the pic below speaks for itself. The water level – dark blue line – of Lake Constance rose dramatically. Good job it was abnormally low to start with or we’d have had flooding. This month, however, has been better and I’ve…
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One hundred years and six months… #LakeConstance #Switzerland
The bathing hut in Rorschach, ten train-minutes up Lake Constance from here, was built in 1924. And in all the years since then, it’s been a swimming place, meeting place, feel-good summer place for the people of Rorschach and further afield. Some of my friends who grew up in the area learned to swim there,…
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A Street Art Festival… #books
Last week, fellow writers Alison Baillie, Louise Mangos and I went to the International Street Art Festival in Frauenfeld. Many of the exhibits from the first festival in 2023 are still there in town, and this year, a different set of artists was invited to contribute with paintings on walls and buildings, also ceramic artwork…
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Many quilts and a bargain #book…
(Scroll down for the bargain book…) It was raining in St Gallen last Monday, so a friend and I decided to go to a museum. The Textile Museum being nearby, we dripped in there and found an exhibition of very photogenic quilts and quilting: I seem to have lost the full version of the one…
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Four beers and a “snowstorm”…
Here we are in May, and we had several lovely summery days in N.E. Switzerland last week before the weather broke and brought us some much needed rain. Last week, I visited a microbrewery in St Gallen with the Anglo-Swiss Club. No one has ever called me a massive beer drinker, but it was fascinating…
